Perception.

“A monk decided to meditate alone away from his monastery.

He takes a boat and floats out to the middle of the lake, closes his eyes, and begins to meditate.

After a few hours of unperturbed silence, he suddenly feels the blow of another boat hitting his.

With his eyes still closed, he feels his anger rising, and when he opens his eyes, he is ready to shout at the boatman who dared disturb his meditation.

But when he opened his eyes, he sees that it was an empty boat, not tied up, just floating in the middle of the lake.

At that moment, the monk understands that anger is within him; it simply needs to hit an object to provoke it.

After that, whenever he meets someone who irritates or provokes his anger, he remembers; the other person is just an empty boat.”

-N.K. Sondhi

So often in our lives we let things outside of our control ruin our minutes, our hours, our days, our weeks, our memories with loved ones and sometimes our years. Many times the issue isn’t an issue but rather our perception of said “issue.” Often times this results in us ruminating over the problem and us losing time and energy.

This is directly related to our neurology. Our amygdala (the fear center of the brain) essentially gets triggered when we come in contact with something stressful.

So in the above poem as the monk was meditating he was engaging his prefrontal cortex (the thinking part) and when his boat was “hit” by the other boat the monk perceived it as someone hitting his boat. However, what would have happened if he just thought it was the wind and the waves causing the boat to rock rather than another boat hitting him? Would he have stayed calm? In the monk’s state of meditation he chose to be angry, or maybe was “forced” or “led” to feel angry due to all of the monks previous experiences around water, in a boat, etc. His reality was shaped by his experiences and in the monk’s mind the cause of his stress was due to someone else, because the only possibility for him being disturbed was by another person a boat hitting his..

It wasn’t until he was able to open his eyes and process (utilizing the prefrontal cortex) what had happened that allowed the monk to realize that the anger was not because of someone else but rather because of the monks own reaction.

We discussed the balance between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex in a previous blog that you can read here titled the “Thinking Brain versus the Anxious Brain”.

If you want to learn more on emotional regulation here is a link to a great handout put out by University of California’s Psychiatric Hospital click here to read.